Standing in the Doorway

It's Bob Dylan's 72nd birthday today, and as I have for nearly 20 years, I give thanks that Bob was not the one to butcher Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Brentwood that grim summer night in 1994. If he had, I'd have stopped listening to Bob's music that long ago, and not only would have had to give up all the dazzling old stuff that provided me with emotional, intellectual, and musical sustenance since I first heard "Like A Rolling Stone," but the great new stuff that has since come from Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times (assuming, of course, Bob was still writing songs after committing double murder....Orenthal James Simpson was still playing golf after committing those double murders, so anything is possible). Would I really have gone cold turkey like that? I guess it would depend upon Bob's behavior after the killing. If he had been filled with confession and remorse, I probably could've been fine with letting the law mete out the requisite punishment. As loyal readers know, The Nobby Works approves of reconciliation. It would have been an entirely different matter, however, if he had taken the Odious James Simpson route (note, since the trial I take quiet offense when people refer to him by the endearment OJ, and I'm moved to write angry letters when sports lackeys still call him Juice...that would be you, Bryant Gumbel).
Perhaps, it's worth taking a moment here to ponder what if Simpson had taken the Dylan route in dealing with his suffering. What if rather than taking a knife to the woman who broke his heart, he had taken out a guitar and written something like "Standing in the Doorway"? Would merely ruminating in verse whether he would kiss her or kill her have been enough to stanch his aching heart and save two lives. Is the simple twist of fate here one man born to express himself intellectually and one born to express himself physically?


Don’t know if I saw you, if I would kiss you or kill youIt probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhowYou left me standing in the doorway, cryingI got nothing to go back to now...Maybe they’ll get me and maybe they won’tBut not tonight and it won’t be hereThere are things I could say but I don’tI know the mercy of God must be nearI’ve been riding the midnight trainGot ice water in my veinsI would be crazy if I took you backIt would go up against every ruleYou left me standing in the doorway, cryingSuffering like a fool
In any case, Simpson did not occupy the same lofty level in my personal pantheon as Dylan does. I admired him immensely, however, even though he played for a team that regularly beat down my team and he had some of his greatest games against the Patriots. He was truly wondrous to behold on a football field. His running style was a stunning blend of power and speed that transcended team loyalties. His deft comic turns in the Airplane movies confirmed the general impression of a uniquely talented and supremely likable human being. Then came the murders and the bloody details of what he did to those two human beings strolling home from dinner that night. And the hideous trial in which 1 in 170 million odds were turned into a shadow of a doubt, where a cop's loose tongue was turned into an indictment of an entire justice system, where black racism rushed into the arms of white racism for a danse macabre, and where a rich man's lawyers and money could sell ordinary citizens on the intellectual pornography that is jury nullification... that they could balance the scales of racial injustice by setting him free.
I probably put more energy into thinking about whether I would boycott Dylan if he had had ever killed someone like Simpson killed Ron and Nicole than seems normal. But I do it because I'm really perplexed by the question of how much leeway we give our heroes before their  transgressions negate the joy they provide us. I'm particularly keen to this issue because, as I've posted in the past, three of my personal heroes have tread a very fine line between being, let's say, eccentric in their behavior and personalities and being reprehensible. And I'm always curious where I and others draw that line. How much margin for error do we give them and deny others? And what about where we draw that line does it tell us about ourselves and our biases? 
For instance, I've found it personally revealing to self examine how I reacted to the sins of Cat Stevens and Phil Spector respectively. After Stevens, now  known as Yusuf Islam, seemed to endorse the Iranian Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1988, I immediately stopped listening to his music. Admittedly, depriving myself of Tea for the Tillermanand Teaser and the Firecat was not at the same level of deprivation as forsaking Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks, but I really did like the man's music and it called on all the willpower of my childhood Lenten days to resist playing "Morning Has Broken" when I would awake with it on my lips. On the other hand, when creepy megalomaniac Phil Spector shot woebegone actress Lana Clarkson in the head and was found guilty of second degree murder, it never occurred to me to turn my back on his Wall of Sound. Spector's crime was clearly the more heinous, and unlike Yusuf Islam he didn't even attempt a lame and muddled explanation for his actions. Yet, for me, what Yusuf did was a betrayal of a fellow artist...and artists in general...who have struggled against totalitarianism and fundamentalism for centuries. That touched a nerve with me. My willingness to abandon Yusef's music until his acts and words finally rebalanced the scales clarified for me how highly I value honor among artists to support the free expression of other artists.
The murder of Lana Clarkson, sadly, falls into the long tawdry line of celebrity scandal that never quite rises to the level of moral cause. No matter their transgressions, we routinely consume the product of wife beaters, pedophiles, drug addicts, bullies, cheats, liars, killers, etc. without mounting our high moral horse. But every once in a while, someone famous crosses a line that we will not tolerate and we mount up. When we do that, we're revealing much more about our own values and morals than we are about those we condemn. 


Video excerpted from Martin Scorsese's documentary No Direction HomeMusic, "Standing in the Doorway" by Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind album